My personal theory is that Akiyama is written as a foil to Yakuza's fifth most popular character - the villain of Yakuza 3, Yoshitaka Mine. Mine is an evil money man who gets enough money from his money magic to bankroll the entire Tojo clan. He's evil so he uses his money to fund crime and propel himself into a position of power. Akiyama is a neutral money man who gets enough money from his money magic to hand out to poor people who ask him for it. He's neutral, so he uses his money to improve the life of a few individuals and feel good about himself. And Kiryu's ridiculous ultra-wealth from Yakuza 0 fell into the plot hole so we don't have a good money man. EDIT: by the way, Akiyama is the 4th most popular character, beaten by Saejima, Kiryu, and Majima. And yes - Yoshitaka Mine is the most popular Yakuza villain.
47:23 No no no no, this is the thing that really takes the cake. Bring on all the codeless safes, I don't care, but "artificial crime" being created by releasing inmates?! What next? They're gonna raise unemployment by increasing the minimum wage? They're gonna get rid of the drugs on the streets by making possession illegal? They're gonna grow a company by laying the staff off? Oh... Yeah, they're actually gonna do that, this game is bollocks.
Yup, and the worst cutscene in this game has not even happened yet. The one at the end of Kiryus long battle. That one will put him into a coma. Not that Yakuza 5 is much better in this regard, thankfully 6 kinda saves it. 4 and 5 (imho) were just like: "Who wrote this?????" the games.
@@okuliare18 Tbh the entire last act of Yakuza 4 is a travesty in terms of its story. Despite some odd bits here and there I actually think Yakuza 4's plot had an interesting start, but then you get to Tanimura's section and from that point onwards the story goes completely off the rails, and not in a good way. Some parts were so mind numbingly stupid that they became inside jokes within the community (rubber bullets...) Can't say much about Yakuza 5's plot since I haven't really played it myself yet, but I've heard a lot of bad things about it. The PS3 era of Yakuza kind of seems like the dark ages of the franchise in retrospect, at least in terms of storytelling.
@@Wintd1 Ah I agree Y4 had an okay start, albeit with too many obvious infodump cutscenes. I think after Saejima escapes prison it starts going downhill, and just snowballs into the pinnacle of stupidity from there. Y5 is actually similar, the first "part" is okay, and then you wish you never started it in the first place. At least it has some really fun minigames and had a new engine. I have a theory that Y3 was supposed to be the last game with Kiryu as the protagonist (some dialogue lines and overall finality of him settling down suggest this), but then during development of Y4 they changed their mind and had to change and rewrite stuff last minute, resulting in this mess. Still, the Saejima backpedaling is hilariously stupid and a meme for a reason, completely ruined his character for me. With Y5, without spoiling anything, they just completely went mad with quantity over quality in that one. Lots of cities, characters, plot twists, most of them terrible. They just threw EVERYTHING at a wall to see what sticks I guess. It was a big step up in terms of overall presentation, graphics, animations compared to 3 and 4, but writing was kinda the same crap as in 4, just on a bigger scale. Thankfully they hired actually competent writers for 0 and 6 I guess. I would say that Y3 was not bad at all though. Yes, there is that over the top, "cool" CIA, MIA or whatever, but it is way better than anything in 4 and 5. And the Okinawa slice of life stuff was pretty good, at least I liked it a lot.
I absolutely know this isn't what the writers intended, but I think it's a great idea to have someone who's a genius at gaining money be a complete fucking idiot in every other way. It's accurate to real life
I kinda like how stupid Akiyama is. He's kinda like Timothy Dexter shipping coal to Newcastle, or Diogenes living past 60, or some drunk falling off a truck and just walking it off, or anytime the USA defeated the British. "Victorious dipshit" is a real thing that happens and I love it. Admittedly I'm still fond of him for not charging interest (usury is a big sin), and being a friend of the homeless (oppressing the poor is also a big sin), which is a big part of why I'm overlooking his scummy actions, but he's apparently immune to the temptations of greed.
Ah. This would be the mental breakdown episode, then. I mean, it's very much in tune with how Akiyama doesn't seem to give a damn about anything, including his fortune. Not that it makes it any more sensible.
I beg of you if you ever do a clip on the rant please make it epic with cuts from the previous let's plays to show the pure magnitude of how awesome that was.
Oh yeah Akiyama's that kind of character that's supposedly smart but instead is just written as 'Just Knows/Guesses Part Of The Plot and/or relevant exposition when it's time to Explain Things to the audience/confused characters but is really stupid otherwise' (i guess the Just Knows Things powers somehow applied to his stocks trading )
Btw since you mentioned it: someone once told you that the sidequests in this franchise are not canon, but there is no actual evidence or confirmation that supports this idea. So far its entirely a fan theory.
People have also claimed that EVERY side quest is canon, which I can't really agree with. Kiryu the hostess manager and especially Kiryu the real-estate manager just don't really fit with the overall story. I think it's reasonable to think that side and main quests are two separate canons with their own continuities. Side quests remember side quests from other games, but there's just so many of them, and there's rarely time for them in the main story. You basically always have to be ignoring something urgent to do them, and there's like 40-60 per game. A few would be endearing, bit en masse they really screw with Kiryu's characterization with how much time he's wasting. Yakuza isn't a slice of life comedy, he's got shit to do.
@@KeithBallardA The weird thing is that's kind of what Nagoshi intended back when he first created the series. Back when he was developing the first game, he insisted that the game should be balanced around the main story so that it's possible to complete it without doing any of the substories. This would let players define what sort of character Kiryu is and where his priorities lie. Say for example; Date's in trouble somewhere and urgently needs help, but because the player would rather visit a cabaret club first, that's what their version of Kiryu would rather do instead. Conversely there might be some players that have absolutely zero interest in visiting cabaret clubs, therefore their version of Kiryu has little to no interest in cabaret either. It's a strange concept when you consider that it doesn't affect how the story plays out or how Kiryu acts in cutscenes, and it'll probably screw with people who're aiming to complete the game 100% (unless they just do most of the side stuff in premium adventure mode after completing the main story), but I guess you could say it was an attempt at letting players personalize their character and have them be defined through their own actions, even if the execution wasn't well thought out.
@@KeithBallardA One of the reasons why i love the Metal Gear franchise is that it taught me that treating the canon of a medium as interactive as video games with the same level of restrictiveness as movies or books is ultimately folly. It made me rethink what "canon" for video games even means. Most people dismiss the side quests because of time constraints, as in, "there is not enough time for Kiryu to do all that he does while dealing with whatever mafia drama that he happens to be involved in that week" but to do that is to dismiss the flexible artificiality of the video game nature. Yakuza is not as meta as MGS is but i feel that it is a franchise that fully embraces its videogameness, to the point that even the live-action movie embraces and blurs the line between serious reality and gameness by having kiryu drinking energy drinks during the climax of the movie to heal a serious injury and defeat the evil bad guy. Similarly, how the comment above pointed out the matter of how much content each individual player gets to see. There are players that will rush and only do the story while there are others that will 100% the game. So, which player experience is canon? The answer is a simple "Yes". Both of them, equally, at the same time, neither of them is less or more than the other. That's the flexible nature of video games, they can have this crazy quantum state unlike traditional story telling. I don't know man, I feel that unless the video game writer explicitly announces that "X part" of their own game "is not canon" (which, imo, is almost always a dumb thing to do, as it feels that the writers are swimming against the tide of the very medium they are working on, but i digress) i won't dismiss things as non-canon simply because "it makes more sense this way" Just my two cents, cheers :)
Both experiences aren't equally canon, though. If you don't play a substory in one game, but then play one that follows up on that story in the next game, the game still assumes you played the previous story. It's like as if you made a choice in Mass Effect but then Mass Effect 2 said you made the other choice anyway, because that's the canon story. All of the side content assumes you're doing 100% completion of every game.
@@KeithBallardA yes, but like i said this happens when a game is going out of its way to explicitly establish if something is canon or not. My overall point is about things that are ambiguous, and how some people dismiss them as non-canon despite no actual evidence/confirmation of such.
The problem with intelligence is the assumption that having it precludes the ability to make *really goddamn stupid* mistakes. Worse in fiction, when a character is supposed to be written smarter then the writers themselves have the capability to be. So we come to Akiyama, who doesn't trust banks and thus doesn't do the one logical thing to safeguard his money... and because neither he, nor the writers, are exactly security experts, a lot of *really* bad blunders happen as a result. It's also worth mentioning that most of Akiyama's talents are in intuition and finances, not so much... a lot of things, as evidenced by his chapters. Not to to disagree with the rant, though - absolutely spot on, and even more confusing because of the fact it's a *plot point* to be that stupid and easy. As someone that spent a good chunk of their adult life guarding things... I just try not to think about the problem. That's how you bruise your forehead and break desks!
In making him so apathetic and cool I feel they really failed to characterize him as someone who would make that money in the first place. Even now his master plan seems to be mostly... own a club. One that's not even doing very well.
27:35 maybe im dumb and im not understanding the point you were making but didn't you yourself said in the end of your let's play that Zero was possibly the best video game story you had experienced?
@@KeithBallardA Keith, i fear that your experiences with Yakuza 1-to-4 may have retroactively tainted your view of Zero a tad bit. Watch the episode 76 of your Zero LP, after the 48 minute mark.
@@prettyevil6662000 No he absolutely did not. I don't even need to check that because Keith semi-infamously did not like Zero Escape - but I checked it anyway, and he said Yakuza 0 was one of the best told stories in videogames
Haha, I had a very similar reaction when I got to that plot point. I am a person that's almost never bothered by plot holes but how did they not remember that the purpose of a safe is to be locked. It's not even hidden. The button is behind the only green book on the shelf and it is huge. It's almost begging people to take it out. I still enjoyed Yakuza 4 more than three. The controls and sidequests are better and the story is dumb, but I find it dumb in a kind if endearing way.
Japan in the late 80s - early 90s went in a deflationary spiral following a real estate bubble bursting, and then roughly stagnated around 0. Inflation over the 22-year 1988-2010 period is a mere 11.53%
@@a.g.r.v.3144 The currency didn't - the asset prices did. You could buy more yen for a dollar in the 80s than in the 90s, so yen was stronger post-bubble. _But,_ the price of land and corporate stocks plummeted, so anyone whose wealth was in land ownership or stocks lost a ton of money. This is presumably what happened to Kiryu's billions from 0 (except that we see him keeping those billions in cash, so I guess don't think about it, Kiryu pulled himself up by the bootstraps, then lost everything and moved on).
All I know is everyones thirsty for Akiyama, seriously every streamer comments on how hot he is, one even going so far as to start barking when he shows up in one of the other games.
Don't worry, Yakuza 5 will get back to the confusing climax ;D I still liked this game (because I'm weird I really like the whole series) but I don't get people either than think 3 is the worst out of them. Either way, thanks for playing the whole series even if it can get pretty rough at times lol
A whole episode just scolding Akiyama for being so awful in every way just gives me life.
My personal theory is that Akiyama is written as a foil to Yakuza's fifth most popular character - the villain of Yakuza 3, Yoshitaka Mine. Mine is an evil money man who gets enough money from his money magic to bankroll the entire Tojo clan. He's evil so he uses his money to fund crime and propel himself into a position of power. Akiyama is a neutral money man who gets enough money from his money magic to hand out to poor people who ask him for it. He's neutral, so he uses his money to improve the life of a few individuals and feel good about himself. And Kiryu's ridiculous ultra-wealth from Yakuza 0 fell into the plot hole so we don't have a good money man.
EDIT: by the way, Akiyama is the 4th most popular character, beaten by Saejima, Kiryu, and Majima.
And yes - Yoshitaka Mine is the most popular Yakuza villain.
47:23 No no no no, this is the thing that really takes the cake. Bring on all the codeless safes, I don't care, but "artificial crime" being created by releasing inmates?! What next? They're gonna raise unemployment by increasing the minimum wage? They're gonna get rid of the drugs on the streets by making possession illegal? They're gonna grow a company by laying the staff off?
Oh...
Yeah, they're actually gonna do that, this game is bollocks.
I remember saying before when you finished your Yakuza 3 LP that Yakuza 4's plot would give you an aneurysm, and it seems I was right.
Yup, and the worst cutscene in this game has not even happened yet. The one at the end of Kiryus long battle. That one will put him into a coma. Not that Yakuza 5 is much better in this regard, thankfully 6 kinda saves it. 4 and 5 (imho) were just like: "Who wrote this?????" the games.
@@okuliare18 Tbh the entire last act of Yakuza 4 is a travesty in terms of its story.
Despite some odd bits here and there I actually think Yakuza 4's plot had an interesting start, but then you get to Tanimura's section and from that point onwards the story goes completely off the rails, and not in a good way. Some parts were so mind numbingly stupid that they became inside jokes within the community (rubber bullets...)
Can't say much about Yakuza 5's plot since I haven't really played it myself yet, but I've heard a lot of bad things about it. The PS3 era of Yakuza kind of seems like the dark ages of the franchise in retrospect, at least in terms of storytelling.
@@Wintd1 Ah I agree Y4 had an okay start, albeit with too many obvious infodump cutscenes. I think after Saejima escapes prison it starts going downhill, and just snowballs into the pinnacle of stupidity from there. Y5 is actually similar, the first "part" is okay, and then you wish you never started it in the first place. At least it has some really fun minigames and had a new engine.
I have a theory that Y3 was supposed to be the last game with Kiryu as the protagonist (some dialogue lines and overall finality of him settling down suggest this), but then during development of Y4 they changed their mind and had to change and rewrite stuff last minute, resulting in this mess. Still, the Saejima backpedaling is hilariously stupid and a meme for a reason, completely ruined his character for me.
With Y5, without spoiling anything, they just completely went mad with quantity over quality in that one. Lots of cities, characters, plot twists, most of them terrible. They just threw EVERYTHING at a wall to see what sticks I guess. It was a big step up in terms of overall presentation, graphics, animations compared to 3 and 4, but writing was kinda the same crap as in 4, just on a bigger scale. Thankfully they hired actually competent writers for 0 and 6 I guess.
I would say that Y3 was not bad at all though. Yes, there is that over the top, "cool" CIA, MIA or whatever, but it is way better than anything in 4 and 5. And the Okinawa slice of life stuff was pretty good, at least I liked it a lot.
I absolutely know this isn't what the writers intended, but I think it's a great idea to have someone who's a genius at gaining money be a complete fucking idiot in every other way. It's accurate to real life
Yakuza's always been kinda ridiculous, but this one takes the cake.
I kinda like how stupid Akiyama is. He's kinda like Timothy Dexter shipping coal to Newcastle, or Diogenes living past 60, or some drunk falling off a truck and just walking it off, or anytime the USA defeated the British. "Victorious dipshit" is a real thing that happens and I love it.
Admittedly I'm still fond of him for not charging interest (usury is a big sin), and being a friend of the homeless (oppressing the poor is also a big sin), which is a big part of why I'm overlooking his scummy actions, but he's apparently immune to the temptations of greed.
Ah. This would be the mental breakdown episode, then.
I mean, it's very much in tune with how Akiyama doesn't seem to give a damn about anything, including his fortune. Not that it makes it any more sensible.
Akiyama wouldn't loan money to Akiyama.
This has been one of my fav episodes so far, just for your rantings at how dumb that whole damn plot is
I beg of you if you ever do a clip on the rant please make it epic with cuts from the previous let's plays to show the pure magnitude of how awesome that was.
Keith is so damn good!, I knew he was introspective and analytic but DAMN! hahaha!!! I love this channel!
Oh yeah Akiyama's that kind of character that's supposedly smart but instead is just written as 'Just Knows/Guesses Part Of The Plot and/or relevant exposition when it's time to Explain Things to the audience/confused characters but is really stupid otherwise' (i guess the Just Knows Things powers somehow applied to his stocks trading )
"Did you read the script, too?"
Btw since you mentioned it: someone once told you that the sidequests in this franchise are not canon, but there is no actual evidence or confirmation that supports this idea. So far its entirely a fan theory.
People have also claimed that EVERY side quest is canon, which I can't really agree with. Kiryu the hostess manager and especially Kiryu the real-estate manager just don't really fit with the overall story. I think it's reasonable to think that side and main quests are two separate canons with their own continuities. Side quests remember side quests from other games, but there's just so many of them, and there's rarely time for them in the main story. You basically always have to be ignoring something urgent to do them, and there's like 40-60 per game. A few would be endearing, bit en masse they really screw with Kiryu's characterization with how much time he's wasting. Yakuza isn't a slice of life comedy, he's got shit to do.
@@KeithBallardA The weird thing is that's kind of what Nagoshi intended back when he first created the series. Back when he was developing the first game, he insisted that the game should be balanced around the main story so that it's possible to complete it without doing any of the substories. This would let players define what sort of character Kiryu is and where his priorities lie.
Say for example; Date's in trouble somewhere and urgently needs help, but because the player would rather visit a cabaret club first, that's what their version of Kiryu would rather do instead. Conversely there might be some players that have absolutely zero interest in visiting cabaret clubs, therefore their version of Kiryu has little to no interest in cabaret either.
It's a strange concept when you consider that it doesn't affect how the story plays out or how Kiryu acts in cutscenes, and it'll probably screw with people who're aiming to complete the game 100% (unless they just do most of the side stuff in premium adventure mode after completing the main story), but I guess you could say it was an attempt at letting players personalize their character and have them be defined through their own actions, even if the execution wasn't well thought out.
@@KeithBallardA One of the reasons why i love the Metal Gear franchise is that it taught me that treating the canon of a medium as interactive as video games with the same level of restrictiveness as movies or books is ultimately folly. It made me rethink what "canon" for video games even means.
Most people dismiss the side quests because of time constraints, as in, "there is not enough time for Kiryu to do all that he does while dealing with whatever mafia drama that he happens to be involved in that week" but to do that is to dismiss the flexible artificiality of the video game nature. Yakuza is not as meta as MGS is but i feel that it is a franchise that fully embraces its videogameness, to the point that even the live-action movie embraces and blurs the line between serious reality and gameness by having kiryu drinking energy drinks during the climax of the movie to heal a serious injury and defeat the evil bad guy.
Similarly, how the comment above pointed out the matter of how much content each individual player gets to see. There are players that will rush and only do the story while there are others that will 100% the game. So, which player experience is canon? The answer is a simple "Yes".
Both of them, equally, at the same time, neither of them is less or more than the other. That's the flexible nature of video games, they can have this crazy quantum state unlike traditional story telling.
I don't know man, I feel that unless the video game writer explicitly announces that "X part" of their own game "is not canon" (which, imo, is almost always a dumb thing to do, as it feels that the writers are swimming against the tide of the very medium they are working on, but i digress) i won't dismiss things as non-canon simply because "it makes more sense this way"
Just my two cents, cheers :)
Both experiences aren't equally canon, though. If you don't play a substory in one game, but then play one that follows up on that story in the next game, the game still assumes you played the previous story. It's like as if you made a choice in Mass Effect but then Mass Effect 2 said you made the other choice anyway, because that's the canon story. All of the side content assumes you're doing 100% completion of every game.
@@KeithBallardA yes, but like i said this happens when a game is going out of its way to explicitly establish if something is canon or not. My overall point is about things that are ambiguous, and how some people dismiss them as non-canon despite no actual evidence/confirmation of such.
The problem with intelligence is the assumption that having it precludes the ability to make *really goddamn stupid* mistakes. Worse in fiction, when a character is supposed to be written smarter then the writers themselves have the capability to be. So we come to Akiyama, who doesn't trust banks and thus doesn't do the one logical thing to safeguard his money... and because neither he, nor the writers, are exactly security experts, a lot of *really* bad blunders happen as a result. It's also worth mentioning that most of Akiyama's talents are in intuition and finances, not so much... a lot of things, as evidenced by his chapters.
Not to to disagree with the rant, though - absolutely spot on, and even more confusing because of the fact it's a *plot point* to be that stupid and easy. As someone that spent a good chunk of their adult life guarding things... I just try not to think about the problem. That's how you bruise your forehead and break desks!
In making him so apathetic and cool I feel they really failed to characterize him as someone who would make that money in the first place. Even now his master plan seems to be mostly... own a club. One that's not even doing very well.
Don't ask how that slum supports a vault. Just be thankful the bookcase didn't rotate.
I always pictures Kuze as being portrayed by Michael Madsen.
27:35 maybe im dumb and im not understanding the point you were making but didn't you yourself said in the end of your let's play that Zero was possibly the best video game story you had experienced?
I doubt it. Zero was neat, but even back then I had known many more impactful stories. I've forgotten most of the game by now.
@@KeithBallardA Keith, i fear that your experiences with Yakuza 1-to-4 may have retroactively tainted your view of Zero a tad bit.
Watch the episode 76 of your Zero LP, after the 48 minute mark.
At that time stamp, he said Zero Escape (a puzzle game). Not Yakuza 0.
@@prettyevil6662000 ahhhhhh, now everything makes sense, goddamn it 🤦
@@prettyevil6662000 No he absolutely did not. I don't even need to check that because Keith semi-infamously did not like Zero Escape - but I checked it anyway, and he said Yakuza 0 was one of the best told stories in videogames
Haha, I had a very similar reaction when I got to that plot point. I am a person that's almost never bothered by plot holes but how did they not remember that the purpose of a safe is to be locked.
It's not even hidden. The button is behind the only green book on the shelf and it is huge. It's almost begging people to take it out.
I still enjoyed Yakuza 4 more than three. The controls and sidequests are better and the story is dumb, but I find it dumb in a kind if endearing way.
Im not sure if it matters a lot but i think you have to facture in the inflation since 1988
Multiply by 1.4 as a simple calculation.
Japan in the late 80s - early 90s went in a deflationary spiral following a real estate bubble bursting, and then roughly stagnated around 0. Inflation over the 22-year 1988-2010 period is a mere 11.53%
@@diametheuslambda im dumb and i don't understand economics, i though that after the bubble the currency would have lost a lot of its worth, oh well
@@a.g.r.v.3144 The currency didn't - the asset prices did. You could buy more yen for a dollar in the 80s than in the 90s, so yen was stronger post-bubble. _But,_ the price of land and corporate stocks plummeted, so anyone whose wealth was in land ownership or stocks lost a ton of money.
This is presumably what happened to Kiryu's billions from 0 (except that we see him keeping those billions in cash, so I guess don't think about it, Kiryu pulled himself up by the bootstraps, then lost everything and moved on).
15 minutes straight of you rambling about an un-safe safe. WOW!
I see you're new here.
You could always just skip it out.
All I know is everyones thirsty for Akiyama, seriously every streamer comments on how hot he is, one even going so far as to start barking when he shows up in one of the other games.
Don't worry, Yakuza 5 will get back to the confusing climax ;D
I still liked this game (because I'm weird I really like the whole series) but I don't get people either than think 3 is the worst out of them. Either way, thanks for playing the whole series even if it can get pretty rough at times lol
I believe its the bad combat and the pacing that gave Y3 such a bad rep
Not even a god damn key omg wtf bro.
And why the hell was she running did I miss something.
You could probably repost this video as an essay lol